IN THE REVIEW

The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery

by Noam Scheiber

Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right

by Thomas Frank

When Obama was elected in 2008, many progressives looked forward to a replay of the New Deal. The economic situation was, after all, strikingly similar. As in the 1930s, a runaway financial system had led first to excessive private debt, then financial crisis; the slump that followed (and that persists to this day), while not as severe as the Great Depression, bears an obvious family resemblance. So why shouldn’t policy and politics follow a similar script? But while the economy now may bear a strong resemblance to that of the 1930s, the political scene does not.

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present

by Jeff Madrick

The great financial crisis of 2008–2009, whose consequences still blight our economy, is sometimes portrayed as a “black swan” or a “100-year flood”—that is, as an extraordinary event that nobody could have predicted. But it was, in fact, just the most recent installment in a recurrent pattern of financial overreach, taxpayer bailout, and subsequent Wall Street ingratitude. And all indications are that the pattern is set to continue.

So, should progressives just give up? History says no—over the past decade American politics have proved astonishingly mutable, with not one but two supposedly permanent majorities quickly collapsing in 2006 and 2010. Things may turn again, as long as progressives fight on. But what would fighting on look like?

The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan's Great Recession

by Richard C. Koo

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy

by Raghuram G. Rajan

We’ve already argued—in the first part of this review—that a rise in government deficits played a key role in preventing the crisis of 2008 from turning into a full replay of the Great Depression. Why not use more deficit spending to push for a full recovery? That’s a question that deserves more serious consideration than it has received so far.

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy

by Raghuram G. Rajan

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance

by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm

It hasn’t been much of a recovery. Unemployment has hardly fallen in either the United States or Europe and US economic growth is slowing. Given this bleak prospect, shouldn’t we expect a scramble to put forward plans for promoting growth and jobs? Apparently not. There is room for action, both monetary and fiscal. But politicians, government officials, and economists alike have suffered a failure of nerve—a failure for which millions of workers will pay a heavy price.

Following are excerpts from a symposium on the economic crisis presented by The New York Review of Books and PEN World Voices at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 30. The participants were former senator Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, and Robin Wells, with Jeff Madrick as moderator.

Can We Say No? The Challenge of Rationing Health Care

by Henry J. Aaron and William B. Schwartz, with Melissa Cox

The Health Care Mess: How We Got into It and What It Will Take to Get Out

by Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein

The good news is that we know more about the economics of health care than we did when Clinton tried and failed to remake the system. There’s now a large body of evidence on what works and what doesn’t work in health care, and it’s not hard to see how …